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Dedication This e-book is dedicated to you and to all aspiring Christian songwriters seeking to make a difference in the world through your music. May it inspire you to think more deeply about the actual craft of great worship songwriting and spur you on to write your best songs in the days ahead. All material herein © Copyright 2020 John Chisum. Used with permission by Nashville Christian Songwriters Int’l LLC. All Rights Reserved. Reprints by permission only. Table of Contents Introduction…. Aren’t there enough worship songs already? 1……… Make listening your lifestyle 2……… Become a student of great songwriting 3……… Get on mission 4……… Develop an extraordinary imagination 5……… Get in community and grow with others 6……… Conclusion and Resources INTRODUCTION Aren’t there enough worship songs in the world already? The first thing I wanted to do after coming to Christ was write a song about it. Apparently I’m not alone. Through many years as a music business executive and now as President of Nashville Christian Songwriters, I have encountered thousands of aspiring songwriters who have a common passion to bring men, women, and children into a deeper sense of worshiping God through their original songs. The flood tide of these songwriters is only increasing, showing no signs of slowing as far as I can tell. In the three years since NCS has begun to offer coaching for songwriters, I have personally spoken with over 1,300 such songwriters about our programs, and, without fail, each of them has relayed a similar story. “I just feel called to songwriting and I know God has something bigger for me,” they all say in one way or the other. I smile and nod, knowing that God is much more jealous for His own glory than all of us combined. Of course He’s got something bigger, I think to myself, listening as they continue to pour their hearts out about this seemingly insatiable desire to write something, anything, that could reach millions of listeners and lead them into the deep love and joy these songwriters feel in their hearts and rightfully long to express in the world through their music. If you’re reading this, you’re probably more called than you can even imagine. God would love nothing There can never be more than for you to excel in communicating His endlessly loving character to millions, even billions, enough worship songs in of people. Why would he not want that?! the world….. never. There can never be enough great worship songs in the world. We’ll be discovering and experiencing new facets of God’s being forever. For all eternity, God will be revealing new aspects of His infinite Being to us. I think about it like that time-lapse video photography of gorgeous flowers opening up. Louis Schwartzberg’s Netflix series “Moving Art” episode called “FLOWERS” is totally mesmerizing and I imagine God opening up beautiful new facets of Himself to us non-stop for eternity like those time- lapsed flowers. Just when we think we’ve seen all of Him, He’ll peel back even deeper layers of His boundless love, grace, and endless powers. And that’s why there can never be enough worship songs in the world, especially great ones. We will never exhaust the beauty of God, not even in the vast eons of timelessness with Him forever and ever. Okay, so I got cosmic on you pretty quickly here, but I’ve actually met people who have so little imagination that they think there’s nothing left to write about in our worship songs. How terribly sad. To say there’s nothing left to write about just tells me you’re not growing in your understanding and experience of God. Do you actually think it’s even possible to run out of things to experience and to write about in our love relationship with God? Well, if your version of God is one-dimensional, flat, boring, and stuck in one outdated mode of understanding, okay. You’ve probably run out of things to say. But, if your relationship is actually a living, breathing, vibrant, organic, and holistic one, you’ll never run dry. Never. And if you think it takes work to make a relationship with God this amazing, you’ve skipped some lessons in grace along the way and started thinking He’s put it all on you to make it happen. Wrong again. Worshiping a god you’re afraid of is no worship at all. It’s idolatry. Heart-felt worship only flows from an all-encompassing organic and visceral adoration of One so obviously beyond us, yet so humbly among us as Emmanuel (God with us). Ultimately, we worship what we place the most value upon, i.e. what we ascribe the most worth-ship to, and that’s an activity of the heart first. “Worship is the one, total adoring response of man to the one eternal God, self-revealed in time.” ~ Evelyn Underhill Just like God may be revealing new facets of His character, nature, and attributes to us throughout whatever “eternity” turns out to be for us, our earthly responses can also grow and reveal new facets of our worship of Him while we’re still here. Sometimes this looks like a raw trusting in the face of a bad diagnosis. Sometimes this looks like letting go of bitterness when you’ve been horribly betrayed by a friend or colleague. Sometimes it looks like actually getting a job you prayed for, or not. Sometimes it looks like forgiving yourself for what you did last night when you’d rather die than tell anyone about it. Sometimes it looks like feeding people you think are too fat or too lazy or too under-engaged with your religious beliefs to deserve your handout. Sometimes it looks like accepting the sexual preferences and lifestyle decisions of people around you, even if you deeply disagree with them from a biblical or cultural standpoint. Sometimes it means giving up something precious to you in order to receive something God seems to think is better for you, leaning not to your own understanding, but trusting His higher wisdom. A response of worship from our hearts to God can come in myriad ways and anything to the contrary is a serious failure of imagination. How could there be nothing left to write about? Our concept and practice of “worship” is greatly impoverished when we reduce it to mere singing. Okay, stay with me. I’m going somewhere with this. You’ve read this far, so hang in there and let me get to the how to of writing engaging worship songs after just a couple more important points, okay? Obviously, we don’t have the space here for an entire treatise on biblical worship, but just recall that the ancient Hebrews had many words for worship that included shouting, kneeling, dancing (even gyrating), and falling on your face before YHWH. Doing any or all of these things neither causes nor guarantees genuine worship. Suffice it to say that singing is just one expression of the many possible ways to worship, so it’s entirely reasonable that we all need to grow in our love and worshipful expressions of God both in and outside of church. Why do I go into all of this before sharing ways to write better and more engaging worship songs? My goal is to engage you in a higher level of thinking about worship before you write it for others. It’s all too easy to target CCLI revenue or think that we’ll feel better about ourselves if we could just get a hit worship song “out there” somehow. But here’s the real question: what’s your own worship like? Are you deeply engaged with God, responding What’s your own to Him with more than a few songs a week? Are you worship like? loving those unique folks around you well? Are you pouring your life out for the culture and even the planet we live on to make it a better place? Not here to judge. These are all questions I ask myself before I sit down at the piano or pick up my acoustic to strum a few chords and sing something. I know what it’s like to sing from an empty heart. I know what it’s like to be an outright hypocrite in what I say and what I do. I don’t want to be there again. What follows are some things I’ve found to be important in writing songs that engage others in exploring their worship of God. I took this picture in the balcony at a Jesus Culture concert a few years back. It was loud. I loved it. Worshiped my guts out. Lost some pounds there. Kim Walker-Smith did her thang. It’s still one of my favorite pics and favorite concerts and I love that they and Bethel Worship and Hillsong grew out of local church expressions of music. I served as Director of Song Development and Copyright Management at Integrity Music and always loved the fact that it grew out of an organic movement of worship, too, as many hundreds of simpler worship songs were bubbling up in the church. Integrity just recognized this move of God and helped the world to catch up. Now it’s your job to capture what God is authentically inspiring in you. What are the real themes bubbling up in your life right now? You can write a great worship song about it.

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